Legal Abortion

More than 85,000 demonstrators marched Sunday from the White House to the Capitol in support of legalized abortion.Under sunny skies and an array of signs that included ''Baby Boomers for Choice'' and ''When Ron Gets Pregnant, He Can Decide,'' they marched behind such feminist superstars as Gloria Steinem, former Rep. Bella Abzug of New York and Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women, which sponsored this ''March for Women's Lives.''Smeal...

A few weeks ago, the U.S. House of Representatives debated and passed H.R. 1797, known as the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. The bill, as referred to the U.S. Senate, begins by establishing the indicators through which medical science has determined an unborn child's capacity to feel pain. In light of that capacity, the bill then goes on to prohibit abortion after 20 weeks of gestation, while including the usual exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. This proposed law, and its focus on the unborn infant's ability to feel pain, introduces the most significant new idea in the national abortion debate since the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.

READING through a recent Sentinel, I found two letters on the subject of abortion. Both take pro-choice viewpoints and make the assumption that legal abortion is a necessity, with no alternatives except back-alley abortions and the burdening of mothers with unwanted children.Apparently the word ''adoption'' has somehow disappeared from the English language. There is one basic reason that this way of thinking has become so common: Abortion is a highly profitable industry. In order to continue as such, it must do everything it can to discourage anything that would lessen its demand.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Among the functions when the Democratic National Convention gavels open Tuesday night -- listen to speeches, wear funny hats, root, root, root for the home team -- is the adoption of the party's platform. The document, a nonbinding statement of principles, matters a great deal to an exceedingly small number of people, who spend long stretches of time indoors niggling over the finer points of a manifesto that will be gnored by the vast majority of Americans.

Supporters of legal abortion on Thursday promised their biggest march yet in Washington to mobilize support to combat legal setbacks in abortion rights. The National Organization for Women, the National Abortion Rights Action League and a host of other groups plan an April 5 march and rally on the Washington Mall. NOW President Patricia Ireland said the Supreme Court's decision to review a Pennsylvania law challenging Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 ruling guaranteeing a woman's right to an abortion, signaled that the abortion-rights movement had to turn to the ballot box for protection.

The billboard in Baltimore might be startling to someone who came of age with the sexual revolution. It says: ''VIRGIN - Teach your kid it's not a dirty word.''The outdoor advertising is part of a $1 million multimedia campaign financed by both public and private funds and supported by both supporters of legal abortion and opponents of abortion. All have united on the worthy goal of reducing teen-age pregnancy by preaching sexual abstinence.Maryland state officials report that since the campaign has been under way, there have been two successive reductions in the teen-age pregnancy rate.

Twenty-five years and nearly 30 million abortions after the Supreme Court's landmark Roe vs. Wade decision, the American public still largely supports legalized abortion but says it should be harder to get and less readily chosen, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows.At base, the country remains irreconcilably split over what many consider the most divisive American issue since slavery, with half the population considering abortion murder, the poll found.Despite a quarter-century of lobbying, debating and protesting by the camps that call themselves ``pro-choice'' and ``pro-life,'' that schism has remained virtually unaltered.

Norma McCorvey, the woman whose fight for the right to an abortion led to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling in Roe vs. Wade, said Thursday that she has joined an anti-abortion group and been baptized by its leader.McCorvey, who was known as ''Jane Roe'' in the court case, made the announcement during a radio interview. She said she was baptized Tuesday by the Rev. Philip Benham, a fundamentalist minister and national director of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.She subsequently quit her job as a marketing director at A Choice for Women, a gynecological clinic here operated by abortion-rights supporters, according to an employee of the clinic.

The Catholic Church and conservative politicians joined Friday in a drive to overturn the German parliament's decision to give women the right to choose abortion.The Catholic bishop of Rottenburg called the parliament's surprisingly strong vote - 357-284 - to scrap the restrictive western German law a free fall into ''the barbarism of the Third Reich,'' and one conservative legislator, Alois Glueck, termed the liberalized abortion law a step toward legal euthanasia.The new law, passed by the lower house of parliament early Friday, permits a woman to choose abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Recent Supreme Court decisions, typically denounced or saluted as conservative, have shown that most conservatism today can be described more accurately as neo-moderate liberalism.Consider four big recent court decisions. Consider how the other linked parts of our political system will probably react. Consider what liberals wanted in, say, 1960 - before liberals started going off the deep end. Consider where we are today and where we're likely headed given the temper of the public. Then ask: Is this conservative?

In an attempt to rally women against their own interests, State Rep. Jeanette Nunez, while masquerading as friend and ally to womankind (Reader's View, Aug. 25), lectures us on why women care way more about the dismal economy under President Barack Obama than they do issues of continued access to legal abortion and affordable birth control . I hate to be the one to inform our esteemed Republican state representative from Miami that the single most important variable in determining a woman's chance of achieving a modicum of sustained economic success in life is this: The ability to control and plan for one's reproductive destiny.

By selecting Bobby Jindal as his vice presidential running mate, Mitt Romney would be reaching for history, much as John McCain did four years ago. The Louisiana governor — born Piyush Jindal — would be the first Indian American ever to run for the White House on a major party ticket. But Jindal could not be more different from Sarah Palin , McCain's pick, who was the first Republican woman nominated for the vice presidency. While Palin was the antithesis of a policy wonk, Jindal, 41, is a former Rhodes scholar who made his name deep-diving into substantive issues like healthcare.

MEXICO CITY -- Lawmakers voted Tuesday to legalize abortions in the Mexican capital during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, capping a heated debate in a Roman Catholic nation that now will have one of Latin America's most liberal abortion policies. The approval had been expected in Mexico City's Legislative Assembly, which contains a majority from the liberal Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD. The measure passed 46-19, and the mayor has pledged to sign the bill. "It doesn't fall to the state to establish a policy of morality.

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's parliament passed a bill Tuesday that legalizes abortion in strictly limited circumstances, state-run media reported. Under the law, abortion will be permitted if the life of the mother is in danger or if the fetus is malformed. But the termination will have to be authorized by three obstetricians plus other specialists, state radio said.

Thirty years after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion, two highly publicized cases and a proposed federal law have escalated the debate on whether the unborn deserve "fetal rights." First, the slayings of Laci Peterson and her unborn son in California thrust the concept of fetal rights to the national stage. Prosecutors have charged Scott Peterson with double murder under the state's fetal-homicide law. Meanwhile, many expect both houses of Congress to pass the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which would create a new and separate offense for anyone harming or killing the fetus while committing federal crimes against a pregnant woman.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush moved Monday to deny federal aid to overseas groups that provide abortion counseling or otherwise help women obtain abortions, reinstating restrictions that had been in place under the previous Bush and Reagan administrations. Bush's action reversed the Clinton administration's policy on aid for international family-planning groups, which former President Clinton had instituted in his first days in the White House. It came on the 28th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that first established a constitutional right to abortion, a day that brought busloads of opponents of legal abortion here for a protest beneath the Washington Monument.

In an attempt to rally women against their own interests, State Rep. Jeanette Nunez, while masquerading as friend and ally to womankind (Reader's View, Aug. 25), lectures us on why women care way more about the dismal economy under President Barack Obama than they do issues of continued access to legal abortion and affordable birth control . I hate to be the one to inform our esteemed Republican state representative from Miami that the single most important variable in determining a woman's chance of achieving a modicum of sustained economic success in life is this: The ability to control and plan for one's reproductive destiny.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush moved Monday to deny federal aid to overseas groups that provide abortion counseling or otherwise help women obtain abortions, reinstating restrictions that had been in place under the previous Bush and Reagan administrations. Bush's action reversed the Clinton administration's policy on aid for international family-planning groups, which former President Clinton had instituted in his first days in the White House. It came on the 28th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that first established a constitutional right to abortion, a day that brought busloads of opponents of legal abortion here for a protest beneath the Washington Monument.

CUERNAVACA, Mexico -- The Morelos state legislature last week passed a law decriminalizing abortion in numerous cases, including rape, birth defects, or when the mother's life is in danger. The law has contributed to a sudden nationwide debate about abortion.

WASHINGTON - Retired Supreme Court Justice Harry Andrew Blackmun, whose 1973 decision legalizing abortion ignited one of the most impassioned public debates of the century, died Thursday at age 90. He had suffered complications from hip-replacement surgery nine days earlier.Many legal scholars saw Blackmun as a prime example of the unpredictable evolution of a Supreme Court justice.A lifelong Republican, he joined the court as a solid conservative but emerged as a liberal champion of women, minorities and the poor, an advocate of strict separation of church and state, and, belatedly, a foe of capital punishment.